I Offered $10,000 to Anyone Who Could Change My Mind | Ep 1013

Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Alex takes on a panel of successful business owners in a rapid-fire debate over some of the beliefs he's shared publicly. Each entrepreneur gets a few minutes to change Alex's mind for $10,000. He defends his position, concedes where the arguments land, and explains the thinking behind his beliefs. The prize goes to the challengers who made the strongest cases. In this episode 00:00 You don't need a weekend–or do you? 04:18 Why one A player costs less than three B players 05:23 Selling to the rich versus selling to everyone else 08:37 Options only have value when you use them 11:07 The game of business versus the craft 14:42 Why priorities matter more than information 16:41 Mediocre employees reflect a mediocre founder 19:00 Lazy, weak, and successful people 20:34 Can "work-life balance" build something memorable? 24:16 Going all in versus betting the farm 26:21 Why "help maxing" and profit maxing work better separately 28:59 The origin of “need” the weekend and sharpening the ax 33:38 Why profit is overrated, and the case for long-term returns 36:41 Balancing a scaling business with raising kids 41:50 The $10,000 winners More Value: Get personalized insights from our team at the 2-day interactive scaling workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/ Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And my job here is to win $10,000 by convincing you to change your mind, right?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Profit is overrated.

• 0:04Speaker 02

  Why am I triggered by this?

• 0:06Alex Hormozi?

  Self-care maxing that I feel like has just softened an entire generation.

• 0:10Speaker 04

  It's irrelevant where the money comes from. It could come from the Pope, from Obama, or from the Martians in outer space.

• 0:15Alex Hormozi?

  My name's Alex Mosi. I've been in business for 14 years, scaled 10 businesses past 10 million, three past 100 million per year. And today I have Backwoods.com, which has portfolio to the $250 million negative revenue last year. Today, I'm going to be debating these exceptional entrepreneurs on some common beliefs about entrepreneurship. And at the end, the business owner that makes the best counter argument wins 10 grand cash.

• 0:38Alex Hormozi?

  You don't need a weekend. The concept is barely 100 years old. It's a modern invention. What you really need is work that you don't need a weekend from.

• 0:48Alex Hormozi?

  Oh, she's taking, yeah. She's letting the guns out. She's taking the guns out.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  I said not to wear white, so I was like, trying to honor that. Okay.

• 0:56Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  I love consuming you and Layla's content. I like, literally like, I mean, all the things I agree with, all the things that you guys have said. And then when it hits these moments as a mother, so like, I'll be going down the highway, I'm listening to the podcast and I'm like, okay. Why am I triggered by this? You know, like, why do I get triggered by this? When I listen to that tweet, I'm asking like, okay, well, they are saying this because they don't have kids yet. Sorry, but y'all are having a child. And so that's why I was like, I wonder if that perspective had changed for you guys, knowing like, maybe you do need a weekend with your family.

• 1:34Alex Hormozi?

  The larger context is that you make trade-offs. And so there's nothing wrong, you don't need a weekend. You can choose to have a weekend and there's nothing wrong with that. But the idea that I must have this, to me, usually points to a larger issue, which is that like, I hate my work. And that's, so let's solve that.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:54Alex Hormozi?

  My work schedule and Layla's work schedule are plenty of dramatically changing post-child. But I would still stand on the argument that like, that it's a trade-off we're choosing to make. We don't need to do it.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03Alex Hormozi?

  We're choosing to do it. Almost every hyper-successful person that I know has had to work sometimes Saturdays and Sundays, or maybe between, you know, dance recitals and practice and whatever else was going on. They're still on their phone, they're slacking, they're moving things forward. And at the most, again, take the hypothetical extreme of if you have two competitors and one is working all the time and one that is not, again, assuming they're both resting and sleeping and hydrating, whatever.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:26Alex Hormozi?

  The person who with the same skill is just working more, gets 104 more workdays per year, they're just going to move, they're going to move a third faster. And in a world where speed is probably the single greatest differentiator between businesses, that person's going to win. And I think a lot of it is just like, it's a subtle pushback against the self-care maxing that I feel like has just softened an entire generation. And I know that a lot of the positions I take tend to be slightly more extreme on the other side. It's because I think the other side is more than loud enough. I'm okay having soundbites being taken out of context for the vast majority of people to hear the core of the message, which is like, you probably can do a lot more than you think you can.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I get the context of why you said it's more of like, and when I listened to your tweet, I'm like, I know that this is not, this is kind of targeted towards more of a person who's like, I gotta live for the weekend. And you're like, you know, I just want to get to Friday. And you're like, that's not, that's not, I think the people that listen to you are not people who are like, get me to Friday, you know, like, those are people, they're like, man, I'm trying to like, scale. I'm trying to do, I'm trying to do hard shit. And so when we try and do hard shit and then hearing like, you can't need a weekend. I was like, dang it, like, you know, like, I'm like, but sometimes I do, Alex. Like, what do you, what do you say to that?

• 3:50Alex Hormozi?

  I think it's, I think it's a really fair point. I think, I think you bring up a really good one, which is just that, in some ways, I will straw man the people who are not actually the audience that I have. I would say the seeker is not my core audience. A lot of entrepreneurs, people who are business interested, still consume my stuff. But the core of my audience is business owners. And if they, if they've been around me for any period of time, they probably know that my position. And so I think, I think you bring up a good point.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Okay. Awesome. Thank you.

• 4:16Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. So cut three B players to hire one A player and then pay the A player what you'd pay two B players. You'll save more and make more.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Sometimes when you're building, you just can't afford the A players. In the early stages, you just kind of have to play the cards that you were dealt. There are times where I wanted A players and I just knew I wasn't in a position to get them or retain them. And, and sometimes knowing timing is very important because sometimes you bring on those A players too early and you'll set your business back, or you'll ruin relationships that you need for the progression of the business.

• 4:51Alex Hormozi?

  So I would say A players within this context is horizontal as well as vertical. So horizontal being if we have three cashierists, there's going to be an A player cashierist. They're not going to be the same as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but amongst the competition of cashierists, I want to pay someone significantly more to have them outperform the other cashierists. But said differently, pay better people better and it will cost you less than paying poor people poorly.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  That was the best one I had for that one.

• 5:20Alex Hormozi?

  Okay.

• 5:23Alex Hormozi?

  Sell to the rich until you have enough money to sell to all the poor people.

• 5:28Alex Hormozi?

  All right, let's do it. Boom.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  I've been involved in two industries where in the past that I just go to where people don't have that much money. And one of them is I used to be a real estate investor and I would have trailers and low-income housing. And they are better than the high-value houses. Why? Because a lot of times they pay cash. Okay. A lot of times you can go into subsidized housing where you get a check in the mail, right? I've also been part of, I have a company for construction and engineering. We fix existing buildings. And where I am, that industry has grown tremendously just because of the Champlain Towers collapse and a lot of laws have come into place where they have to fix these buildings.

• 6:15Alex Hormozi?

  So the two primary things that you brought up were subsidies and laws.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 6:21Alex Hormozi?

  So fundamentally, money doesn't appear out of nowhere. And so if the government is mandating that the money comes or that people have to do things, they, because of money that rich people pay in taxes, allow all of this to fundamentally happen. And I'm, to be clear, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's fine. That's a good, you know, system working. It's not like the money art like appears because of market dynamics.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Well, it's irrelevant where the money comes from. It could come from,

• 6:46Alex Hormozi?

  Oh, sorry.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  It's irrelevant where the money comes from. It could come from the Pope, from Obama, or from the Martians in outer space. As long as, as long as the money's there and it's there for the taking, which opens up the market and makes it ripe for taking, then where does it matter where it comes from?

• 7:02Alex Hormozi?

  Like, the premise of the, of the claim is that when you sell to the rich, you allow yourself to have this margin. Because government and regulatory in general disrupt normal market dynamics, it pushes. So basically you carve out an exception because of outside money that comes in. Basically, in a pure capitalist society that didn't have any regulation whatsoever, then you have to go where the money is. Now, to be clear, again, I'm super pro you going after this, but we want to make sure that like, the money is coming from still the wealthy.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  I have a friend, he owns used cars. He told me one day, and I was totally surprised at the amount of money he makes off of these people that, that have to get these high-interest loans in order to get the cars. And they, and he makes bank on them. He makes a lot of money. And again, I understand your point. But we're talking about carving yourself out the market and at the end of the day, making money, right?

• 7:59Alex Hormozi?

  So like, basically, you either sell to the high end of the market, you maximize as a premium, or you're a low-cost leader, which is what your friend is kind of doing, right? If you're a low-cost leader, you have to make it up in volume. In order to make it up in volume, you usually have to sustain more costs upfront, which is more inventory. And yeah, like Walmart, for example, like, no one argues that Walmart doesn't sell to rich people. It's that, that in order to sell to all the poor people, you have to have a shitload of money.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Well, you make, you can make more money by selling 100 Chevys than selling one Ferrari. But if you could sell two Ferraris or three Ferraris, you can make more than somebody that sells. I get your point. Yeah.

• 8:36Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. But yeah, great points, man. Options only have value when they are used, not stored. At some point, you need to make a trade and go all in. I made that because I have this, it's a theme of like the year for me in terms of my, like, call it my business-adjacent content. It's just that I think society has been telling especially younger people, but even mid-aged people, that they should always keep their options open. And then they're, you know, 45 and never having committed to anything, and then wondering what happened. And because in their, in their pursuit of trying to keep every option open, they actually close all their doors. Because they're unwilling to commit to one. And so, and this happens in business, it happens in relationships, it happens in kid-having, like, all of that stuff.

• 9:19Alex Hormozi?

  I'm strongly encouraging people to knowingly make trades. And I think that almost all the best parts of life come on the other side of commitments, which means that you close other doors that you know. Like, you get married, you close the door of every other person besides the person you're married to, but it's still worth it. And boop.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  I don't think we'll disagree on the overall premise.

• 9:37Alex Hormozi?

  Okay.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  The other thing I think options are useful for is though helping you focus on what you actually wanted. So here's just a basic example. I asked my wife, hey, do you want to go out to dinner on Friday? She says, yes. I say, where do you want to go? And then she's like, I don't know, give me some options, right? Which sucks, by the way. It's never going to go well. But okay, there's Chinese food, there's Italian food, there's Mexican food, there's American food, whatever. And then I, then she's like, well, I don't know, just pick one. It's too many options you want to choose. Okay, I'm like, let's go to Italian. And then she suddenly knows exactly what she wants. She's like, actually, I do want Chinese. So the options were only useful to help her focus and pick what she actually wanted. So I think options are useful as a filter or as a, as a focusing element.

• 10:16Alex Hormozi?

  I think you have, I mean, an option precedes a selection. So like, you can't select something you don't have the option to select. And so I mean, yeah, I see that as a prerequisite. The objective is more against kind of cutting it earlier in the story, which is, here's all of the options we have. And if your wife says, give me more options, and then just keep saying, give me more options, until eventually dinner time is already over and it's nine o'clock and you're like, fuck it, I might as well just stay in and we'll microwave something.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:44Alex Hormozi?

  And I think most people's lives are, let's just stay in and microwave something rather than going after what they really want.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  And that's why I wasn't going to argue along.

• 10:50Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. That was a dirty analogy on my part, I will say. If I may, I think that was pretty good. Microwave lives. TV, TV leftover microwave lives, man. I know, right? It's pretty good.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  All right, maybe hot take, maybe not. Let's see. I think that the game of business is massively overrated. And I think the craft, the product, the service that you choose to go into is massively underrated. Hey, let me ask you a question. Do you think you would have slept on the floor of a tax accounting firm? As if it wasn't a gym in the early days especially?

• 11:33Alex Hormozi?

  Let's, let's take the assumption that I was a CPA. Cause I almost got a Master of in County. I went to, I applied.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  Change it to something else. Janitorial.

• 11:41Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. But I, I would have, because the reason that I slept on the floor was had nothing to do with the business. It was because I was so afraid of failing. So I would have, I would have done, it would have, it didn't matter what I was doing. I would have just said I was either going to die or make it work.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  I put it a different way.

• 11:57Alex Hormozi?

  I like your point though.

• 11:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. Something interesting from the workshops here. Question was asked yesterday. It was, who here wants to sell their business? And 95% of people's hands went up. And, you know, I can't help but wonder like, are any of these companies going to be here in five, 10, 15 years? You know, are they actually going to be an Apple or Hermes, you know, any lasting brand, Patagonia? If people are really just, you know, again, I'm not speaking for others here, but are they doing it just for the game? And I asked people after, I'm like, oh, you know, if you sell, what are you going to do? Start another business? Okay. Why? Love of the game, you know, is the game becoming the woman in the red dress in of itself? Are people distracting from finding meaning through the business?

• 12:42Speaker 05

  And they're just doing meaning in the game and the searching and the growth of business?

• 12:47Alex Hormozi?

  I think that entrepreneurs go through stages, kind of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like in the very beginning of my career, my entire mission of the business was don't be broke. And so, once you solve that, then it's, you can kind of work your way up the ladder. And so I think it just depends on where you're at in your, call it entrepreneur stage. There are some people who day one, you're Zuckerberg, you know, and you're like, I want to build a social network that maps the world, or whatever it is that he started out for. And he never wanted to sell. And I think that the, the business owners who are missionaries, not mercenaries, always end up making the most money in the end, because they can think on the longest time horizon. And so, Sam Altman said this, but he said, he thought that patience is still one of the last moats that exists. And the only way to have patience and think for a very long time, which again, is a very anti-human thing, is to want to do the thing.

• 13:32Alex Hormozi?

  I think the way that you describe it, I would say, is different than I would understand it, because I see your product and the craft as part of the game. And if, if anything, it's almost the core of the game. Like, I think Naval has a quote where he says, "You are focused on sales because you know how to market, and you're focused on marketing because you know how to build a product." And so I think that's, at the, at the core of it is what's the, what's the core value exchange? And making sure that it's good for everybody. And if you do that over a long term, then everybody wins.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Agreed.

• 13:57Alex Hormozi?

  Boom, boom. Concede. Hey, real quick, if your business isn't scaling as fast as you want, then I'd love to give you a free gift that you can get in under 10 seconds, which is the $100 million scaling roadmap. So if some of these comments that I'm making are kind of resonating with you and you're like, man, that's true. Like non-obvious truths, then I'd love to give you a whole lot more of them, specific to your business scaling stage right now. And so this is the $100 million scaling roadmap. It's free and you get it under 10 seconds. This took hundreds of hours to put together and it's yours, absolutely free. And shit, it took decade plus of time to learn all the errors that, that put this together. So it's one of those valuable things I can give you if you're a business owner and you're trying to scale faster than you are, and you can get it under 10 seconds for free. So grab it, enjoy, and hopefully I'll see you in one of these videos. You lack priorities, not information. Problems are easy to solve if you know what you're after.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  So I think sometimes when you're in an emerging market or just new industry, sometimes you'd need that information to kind of get that guidance and that structure. If I understood like fundraising and those type of elements before, I would have, it would have fundamentally changed how I built my business or how I went about it. So I think sometimes you do need that information and it's not just about priorities.

• 15:07Alex Hormozi?

  I'll say, I agree. The larger point of the tweet is that the vast majority of people know what they need to do and they're not doing it. And that is the, that is the deeper problem. So if I said, for example, you want to lose weight, you could say, well, I don't, I don't have enough information to lose weight, but you probably know that you need to stop eating shit and move. Whether it's 10 reps or six reps, or whether it's a keto or, you know, high carb or low carb, or whatever you end up doing, you probably know, like you directionally know what to do. And so to the same degree, if I were to have a big enough incentive, do you have kids or anybody you care about? Do you have anyone you care about in the world? Hold on.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  I've got, right now, yeah, I've got my team, my team, those, that's my family, so.

• 15:45Alex Hormozi?

  So let's assume that your team and parents, because let's hopefully you care about them,

• 15:51Alex Hormozi?

  get kidnapped and it's, you have to double the business in 90 days. Would you be able to do with all the information you have now?

• 15:57Speaker 05

  Business in 90 days, oof.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  If 90 days, I'm, I think so. I actually think, damn, that kind of puts things in perspective. I need to just do that, do that now.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I probably could.

• 16:13Alex Hormozi?

  And so then it would mean that you didn't lack information, you lacked priorities. And to be clear though, I think the point you have, if you, because take it in the natural extreme, if you knew absolutely nothing about anything, then you would not know what to do. Most people do have a directional idea of what they should be doing, but then just get caught in the minutia because they don't have, have enough prioritization.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  Got it, got it.

• 16:33Alex Hormozi?

  No, it's good. It's good. Uncomfortable truth, if your employees are mediocre, you probably are too.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Well, much to his point, when I started out my business, I'm a professional engineer. I'm a structural engineer and I'm the one that signs and seals everything. Nothing goes out of my office until I look at it. That's the way the law is set up. Therefore, from the get-go, I am the competent one. Now, of course, when I started, you know, you don't, you don't make much money and you have to hire people. And I went through so many people. But just doing that taught me so many valuable lessons. It taught me, first of all, how to hire. And now, after 26 years in my, in my business, I finally, and it's very hard to, to hire, I mean, you guys probably know all this, to hire good, competent people.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  But I think it's a process, especially in the beginning, where hiring bad people is actually more of a lesson than it's not.

• 17:28Alex Hormozi?

  So I think your, your whole point proves the point, which is that when you were not skilled before, you were mediocre and as a result hired mediocre people. And then as you became less mediocre, you hired less mediocre people.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Well, it depends on what you call mediocre. Because when you look up in the dictionary and you take the, the actual word mediocre, I, at that point in my career, do not fit mediocre. But when you take it in the sense of when you're starting a business and you, and you do want to be, you know, that competent person, then you're, you're right. So it's a matter, I think, more of a definition of what mediocre is.

• 18:08Alex Hormozi?

  Is there somebody who has succeeded in your space at a greater degree in less time than you have? And if the answer is yes, then it means they had more skills than you did earlier in their career. And so it just took them less time to learn the lessons in order to grow, because they were able to attract better talent and then, and then hit it harder. And so, I don't want, anyone who's watching, think like a prerequisite for gaining skill is time. You can compress time. And all you have to do is look at the most successful versions of whatever business or industry you're in, and see what they did that was faster, and then try and model it.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a couple of people in my industry where their fathers were an engineer and they just got into that. But this is just a major outlier, but I understand what you're saying.

• 18:52Alex Hormozi?

  Rock and roll. Thank you. You excited for a spicy one? Lazy people don't know how to start. Weak people don't know how to finish. Successful people don't know how to stop.

• 19:00Speaker 06

  I think it's nuanced. I agree with the first two points for sure.

• 19:06Speaker 06

  Successful people have to learn how to stop eventually. And this is going to tie into the next point that I disagree with, but I won't go there yet.

• 19:16Speaker 06

  Because if you don't stop, and stop is subjective. Stop could mean 15 minutes of white space in your calendar. Stop could mean a day on the couch binging Netflix. I don't know. It means different things to different people, but stop fuels you. Even when you love what you're doing.

• 19:32Alex Hormozi?

  I'll agree that rest is productive, a certain amount of rest. If we were to use broad brushstrokes, which is what we're using, lazy people not starting, that is probably one of the prerequisites of being lazy. Weak people not being able to finish, one of the prerequisites of being weak is that you cannot, you know, you have low frustration tolerance. You can't deal with hardship. And then successful people, so how do we define success? It would really just be like, they get the desired outcome more times than not. And typically, people who have that, especially at the highest levels, have some pathology that sometimes prevents them from stopping. You would look at, you know, can this person sustain a certain period of time? It's not that they don't sleep, because obviously you could only work for, you know, 40, you know, 40 hours and then you die, or whatever, you know, whatever happens.

• 20:13Alex Hormozi?

  So no, it's just that the people who are, I would say, almost compulsive or obsessive about their craft be people who are not.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I agree.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  So in one of your tweets, you said that, and I want to try to get this right. Nobody who's ever preached work-life balance has ever built anything memorable.

• 20:37Alex Hormozi?

  Sure.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  But I don't think you, I don't think you actually agree with this. And one of the people you quote often, Marcus Aurelius, doesn't agree with it either, because I think it's the wrong scoreboard. But I can also disprove it anyways. And my job here is to win $10,000 by convincing you to change your mind, right? So, so at first I thought it was a bad scoreboard. But then I thought, well, has there been anybody who preached work-life balance that has built something memorable? So I just want to talk about two brands real quick, Patagonia and Chick-fil-A. The founder of Patagonia didn't set out to be a capitalist. He just became a billionaire over time, but it worked out for him. Brutal leader in the, in the, in the boardroom. But he would argue for work-life balance. He actually wrote a book called Let Them Go Surfing. Yeah. So I think what he is saying is that you do need some work-life balance.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  And he preached it to himself and he would go fishing, what, six months a year? The second person is Truitt Cathy, who built Chick-fil-A and started on-premise that we're going to be closed on Sunday. So people do have time for their family, for worship, for their hobbies. So I think both of those brands, we would both probably agree are very memorable and have been led by people who preach work-life balance.

• 21:39Alex Hormozi?

  So that's Truitt Cathy. So his book, Wealth, Is It Worth It?

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:42Alex Hormozi?

  Good book. I wouldn't argue that taking Sunday off is work-life balance as like the preaching. I would say that he's sticking to his kind of religious stuff. But if you look at how those managers work, like they work a lot.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 21:53Alex Hormozi?

  Most of them work six days and they pretty much are there the whole time. And I would say that, is there an exception that, is there anyone on earth? And we can use, what's his name? I always forget his.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Yvonne.

• 22:04Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, I always mess up his name.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:06Alex Hormozi?

  From Patagonia, because he's, he's a good example of somebody who, who took, you know, big, big, big tranches of time off and building something memorable. So I would say that he's an exception to that. I would say largely, most of the people, and I think that specific tweet is pushing against the laptop lifestyle, digital nomad, selling the dream without the price.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:28Alex Hormozi?

  That I tend to push back on overall. And I think it just, it sells, it sells a bill of goods that, that is not, is not true. If you're exceptional, yes. The, the equal opposite is, again, what game are you trying to play? Or what are you trying to win at? You know, Shonard was able to, was able to win. I would say that there's a graveyard of people who haven't been able to do that. And that's okay if that wasn't their goal. But I think where people get in trouble is where they want to build Apple or Patagonia. And if you look at, all the founders are called the Fortune 500. If we can pick three, it's like, do I want to make the bet on the 497 path or the three?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think the only thing, I think we're actually agreeing, but the, the tweet was never. And I think we agree that somebody has. But I do think we can both agree that some, at least a couple of people have built something on a work-life balance that is memorable.

• 23:18Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, I think Shonard's a good, a good counter. I'm trying to think of others because it's, it's pretty tough.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Right, I was deep in Claude to find two.

• 23:24Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Alex Hormozi?

  And I, and I think that kind of, I will agree that never, from a pure binary perspective in tweet writing.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:33Alex Hormozi?

  It, most of the time is, people who preach work-life balance have it wrong. Yes, I think there are, there are a couple of notable examples. But yeah, so I mean, I'll agree that the never is, is not accurate. But yeah, as with broad brushstrokes, I think most people who chase work-life balance and the big outcome end up with neither.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  With the 14 seconds remaining, say, what do you think a better scoreboard might be than just memorable?

• 23:55Alex Hormozi?

  I think it comes down to, and I end a lot of my tweets this way, which is do you, which is that you have to define your own scoreboard and then make sure that you're playing a game whose prize you want to win.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, massive. Thank you.

• 24:06Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 07

  So we're talking about, at some point, you've got to go all in. I'm sure we've all been in a situation where we've come up with an idea and we're, we're sure that this is going to work and it doesn't, for whatever reason. I've always thought there's a lot of merit to the idea of failing fast. But if you're just saying, I'm going to go all in, aren't you going down a corridor and then getting somewhere and thinking, that actually hasn't worked and now I haven't got anything else to go to?

• 24:37Alex Hormozi?

  Is, is the point you're making, you should pick stuff and kind of like not bet the farm? Is that what you're saying?

• 24:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Effectively, I am because I'm saying, okay, I believe in this and I'm going to devote the resources to it. But you never know, there's times when you have an idea that you don't think as much and it works, and then others that are great and nobody else likes it. So yeah, I, I'm not a big fan of betting the farm. What, what would you say to that?

• 25:04Alex Hormozi?

  A lot of business bets are just that, they're bets, right? And you have to size your bets appropriately. But the, the equal opposite extreme that I'm saying is, is that you gather many bets and never make any of them. Which is what I think that's, I think more people have an issue with that than going all in too hard. I think more people just stay on the sidelines, like just trying to collect these things, these bets, as though that like, I want to keep all these options open, but then in so doing, prevent them from succeeding to any of them. But taking the other natural extreme, it depends on the outcome you're looking for. And so I would say, and this is, this might ruffle some feathers, but depending on the size outcome you're looking for, you can bet differently. If you want to become a trillionaire, you have to go all in.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:48Alex Hormozi?

  Period. If you want to become a decade millionaire, you can, you can, it's, you don't have to go nearly as all in. There's a lot of bets that even mediumly done will, will get you there, especially on a long enough time horizon. And so I think it depends reversing, reversing from the goal. But taking to the other extreme, you can for sure guarantee that you will not achieve any of them if you never bet on anything.

• 26:09Alex Hormozi?

  But no, really good. Thank you, sir.

• 26:11Speaker 06

  So yes, focus on the rich and it's a yes and. So we ignore a whole channel of business if we're just focusing here. For example, healthcare space and insurance. A lot of insured people have good benefits and they don't have a lot of expendable cash. Those same people, the insurance rate is the same. And as long as I, as the business owner, protect my margin, that's another referral source. That's another person who might have a life change and then can afford the buy-ups and the add-ons. So yes, you can focus here and we can still support this channel that's going to come in and bring us business.

• 26:46Alex Hormozi?

  I'm all for helping everyone. That is always the position. I want to have the business make the most amount of money so that we can use the money to help more people, even without having an economic backing. Because I think it's like, in some ways, you'll be more efficient at helping people if you make helping people the max. Like basically, if you help max, you will help more people than if you try and blend two objectives. And so if you have a business objective, which is to maximize profit long-term.

• 27:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:12Alex Hormozi?

  Then you'll make more money. And then with a different objective, using that money, you can help more people by help maxing and saying, okay, if I only wanted to help as many people as possible, how would I do it without having to think about return? And so it's just basically, when people chase two masters, I think they satisfy neither. And so this is where I think a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck because they feel, they, they paint themselves into a moralistic corner of like, I want to raise prices, but I can't. And also both industries that were mentioned here are regulated. So like, here are the quote exceptions because free markets don't, free market powers don't exist. The vast majority of businesses aren't in regulate, or nearly as regulated industries. And so more free market dynamics reign supreme.

• 27:52Speaker 06

  So you're optimizing for speed by focusing on the rich?

• 27:55Alex Hormozi?

  I think I'm optimizing for net-net impact.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 27:59Alex Hormozi?

  Which is like, I want to make as much money as I can when I'm in money-making mode. And then I want to help as many people as I can when I'm in help, helping mode.

• 28:07Speaker 06

  So is your argument then that we divert all support for a channel that's not as affluent and divert it all to this? Or do we still keep these channels going? I think that's my point is they're not mutually exclusive.

• 28:18Alex Hormozi?

  No, they're not mutually exclusive. It's more so that when I want to help a business owner, and obviously when I make tweets, I want them to ruffle some feathers. But by and large, if I had to bet nine times out of, you know, 10, when I'm talking to a business owner, they're probably underpriced trying to sell to everyone rather than picking specific avatar that has the most gross profit from there. Then you can build services that are more scalable that can sell to, to lower-end customers.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  Fair point. Concede.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  There's this old proverb, these guys are, they're both, their job is to both cut logs all day. And at lunchtime, the older guy always takes a two-hour break. At the end of the day, they both end up cutting the same amount of logs or the old guy actually outperforms the younger guy. And so he's saying, hey, I'm working way more than you are working, but you're still producing more than I am. What's the secret? And the guy says, well, I spend time sharpening my axe. So when I come back in the afternoon, my axe is just more efficient than yours. So I think this need the weekend thing gives you space to be sharper when you come back to work to get back to it. So I would say you can cut down on some of the time you're spending by resting and making it more valuable when you do come back to it.

• 29:27Alex Hormozi?

  I would say two things. One is that rest is productive. I agree. The premise was about a weekend specifically, not that you don't need rest.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 29:35Alex Hormozi?

  The second point would be that if, in your proverb example, if the guy is sitting there sharpening his axe, I would absolutely define that as work.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  I don't think I can argue with that one. The other part, the other part of the tweet is that a weekend is a new invention, like relatively new, right? A hundred, a hundred years or whatever. But even the weekend wasn't created for rest. The weekend was created for productivity and output. So if you look at the way that Henry Ford created the weekend, the five day work weekend at his factories, was not because he just felt like the families needed time off or that he was trying to be philanthropic. It was, hey, when my workers do pause, they come back and produce more. So in that case, like the weekend was needed to make the output greater.

• 30:15Alex Hormozi?

  If, if that were true, do you feel like,

• 30:21Alex Hormozi?

  how would you explain all the people who do get ahead and work weekends?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  I don't think, I think they're going to get ahead regardless. Because I think the people they're competing with in this space are just not going to do as well as they do. They're not as focused, they're not as planned. So I don't think the extra work is the only reason to get ahead. I think they're going to get ahead.

• 30:39Alex Hormozi?

  I mean, I think that's our selection bias.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:43Alex Hormozi?

  But yeah, I mean, how you create

• 30:47Alex Hormozi?

  work conditions for the masses versus the exceptional, I think is a big difference. And I think to hit the point we said earlier, I think the vast majority of people who follow my stuff are going to, they're trying to be exceptional, not just the masses. When I look at the people who are the most successful in the world, I look at the Elons, I look at the Bill Gates. I think Bill Gates talked about how he didn't take a day off for 10 straight years.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:06Alex Hormozi?

  And I, I believe him. I don't know if there's, and it's probably a less popular thing to say, honestly. And so I think some of these guys take like kind of a hit on from all the work-life balancers. But it's like, they're not trying to work-life balance. They're trying to win.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:20Alex Hormozi?

  And so, again, I, I use this as a, again, and also at what game, right? The larger game of life or the game of business? And I am absolutely like, make no mistake, trying to win at the game of life, not the game of business solely. But understanding what game you're optimizing for the outcome is important. So you know what trades you're making and whether they're worth it.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. We're out of time.

• 31:40Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, dude. No, appreciate it.

• 31:42Speaker 07

  I would say it's more about being open to the information. Cause I would ask you then, what if someone says, I'm going to focus on a priority, but they head in the wrong direction? So they put, they, they go in the wrong way, but focusing on what they believe is a priority. We're sure there could have been other things I could have done. But being open to that information meant that we got a great, a game-changing result.

• 32:05Alex Hormozi?

  I think, I think you raise a good point, which is that someone can prioritize incorrectly. And so I would say my, my position takes it from the perspective of like, you could have priorities and they could be wrong. So I agree. And to the same degree, you could have information and it could be wrong too. But yes, you must have correct prioritization. I think most people don't have correct priorities. And that's what, that's what does limit them is that they, if, basically their stated priorities and then their actual priorities are different. Like how they behave versus how they want to behave are two different things.

• 32:38Speaker 07

  So how much of that is due to the fact that the, they don't have the right information?

• 32:43Alex Hormozi?

  I actually think it's more of a behavior issue. Like it's more of a character trait problem than it is an informational issue. Which is they just don't know how to behave in specific circumstances. So like, again, if I were to say, what should you do to work out and lose weight? People can get that pretty close to right. And then what do you actually do? And as crazy as the difference between how people should eat and work out and what they actually do, I would say that most people's business priorities and what they actually do are that far apart. I mean, humans don't stop humaning. And so it's just within the context of business, they, they act that way. And as a result, have an out of shape business.

• 33:21Speaker 07

  I'd agree, I'd agree with that. I would agree with that.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  My unpopular opinion is I think profit is overrated. And what I'm going to get into, it's going to rattle a couple of feathers. But I think the businesses with the largest opportunities, sometimes seeing a profitable angle in the early stages is very difficult for outsiders. But I think a lot of it is, is really, when it comes to underwriting, it's like finding out more about the entrepreneur and the space and figuring out the long-term plan to a profitable model. I find a lot of times in these situations, I'm going over metrics that just actually don't matter.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And I'm like, well, if I wanted to make my business profitable, I would have just done that in the beginning. Like, that's an easy thing to do in this market. And that's actually what everyone else does. And it's actually the build out in this contrary way that leads to the most upside. So I would say profit is too many times a focus of these investment firms or institutions. And like, it's like, the biggest opportunities are hiding in the mud.

• 34:34Alex Hormozi?

  So the, the frame is long-term profit maximization. So if the argument is short-term profit is not as good as max profit, then the answer is yes. The reason that, you know, an outside investor would look at trailing is because the future is unknown. And so you would have what some would call a story of profitability, but not the reality of profitability. And it's all a theory that you hope will work, but you do not know it will work. Where people get in trouble is that they run a business that is not profitable. And then say they are reinvesting in growth when the reality is they just don't make any money. That's what I, I push back a lot against, which is that we should have tons of gross profit. And we should have the ability to pull out lots of cash flow.

• 35:14Alex Hormozi?

  But we have a clear return on invested capital thesis that we have saying, we made all this, we could make all this money. We choose, and we are making this money, but we're reinvesting it here that's giving us this growth. And that's the trade we're making. We know that this money is going to get us 10 times back. And so we're doing it. It's just that most people don't have that. And so instead they're just kind of low cost leading and have very thin margins. But it's not really growing the business that much. And then there kind of is no man's land.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  If your industry has the ability to tap into revenue streams that you don't have yet. Like one of the things is like content for us is huge, right? And how does someone come in and say, oh, well, they're actually sitting on a gold mine. And they have these four untapped revenue streams and they have just a solid base that supports everything. And then this is all the upside.

• 35:56Alex Hormozi?

  I'll just say that you, you make a hypothetical that has tremendous execution risk. So it's saying like, hey, if we had a massive brand, we would make way more money. It's like, no shit. The difficulties, but right. I was like, yeah, the difficulty is building the massive brand. And so someone is going to take that, agree with you, and then write a discount on their belief in your ability to execute. And so they'll say, I think this guy has a 10% chance of executing this thing that could be a billion dollars. And so they write the check that way. Rock and roll. Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 06

  Okay. So this is like the ultimate dilemma for me because I love what I do and I can get into it. And I want to optimize for two things. And they counteract each other. If I want to optimize for my business and I want to optimize for my relationship with my kids when my business has been sold or whatever happens to it.

• 36:46Speaker 06

  Sometimes I have a hard space making room for the two. And my question is, how do you envision that for you moving forward with what you're scaling?

• 36:56Alex Hormozi?

  I am fortunate and so is Leila to have worked the first, you know, big chunk of our careers pretty aggressively. So that we have the option, not the obligation to work. And so I am trying to win at the game of life, not the game of business. I think business is a component of it. Same as like, I gotta be healthy. I gotta, I gotta do all these different things. I've also gotten to the point in my career right now where I am much more rewarded by the quality of my decisions more than the output of my hands. And so that doesn't take nearly the amount of time as some of the things that I had to do in the earlier stages of the business. And so for me, my, my tentative plan right now is that I'll work from 5:00 AM to 2:00 PM. And that's what I'm, that's what I'm planning on doing. Leila is going to take off significantly more time than that. And she will probably come back and, you know, she'll do whatever the hell she wants, basically.

• 37:42Alex Hormozi?

  But I think that your question is, is one that everyone struggles with because you pointed out two things. But there's, if you look at the dynamics of a human being, it's like you've got your parents that you take care of. You've got your kids, you have your siblings, you have recreational activity, you have personal growth. You have health, you have your marriage, you know, you have spirituality, you have your community. Like there's, there's so many different components and no one's going to say, you know what? This is more important than that. They're all just very valuable things. And so we will always live a life of deprivation around not having done all of the things 10 out of 10. So we want the benefits of being 10 out of 10 on community and 10 out of 10 on our parents and 10 out of 10 on our kids, 10 out of 10 on our marriage, 10 out of 10 on my health. And we're just not going to. And so I think where people get in trouble is

• 38:25Alex Hormozi?

  they judge themselves on somebody else who's 10 out of 10 maxed on this one thing. But they're not looking at the other nine dynamics. And so someone might see our quote business success, but I've done a lot of trade-offs to get that. And so it is obviously exceptional from a statistic perspective in terms of the outcomes. But I've traded plenty of things for it. And some people wouldn't be like, I wouldn't make that trade. I'm like, right, you wouldn't. And that's why you have your life and I have mine and we're all good. It's only, I think people only get in trouble when they think that I say my life is better than yours, which I never would say. And so I think that you having conflicting priorities is the nature of having many important things that we all have to do. And not judging the fact that you're going to do the best you can with what you have. And I think that if at the end of your life, you have a pretty successful business and a pretty good relationship with your kids, you'd be pretty happy about it.

• 39:08Alex Hormozi?

  And if you had a perfect relationship with your kids and not at all with your business, if that outcome is better for you, then maybe you should do that. And the flip side is if you had a 10 out of 10 business and you didn't know your kids at all, you'd be like, I wouldn't like that. And so then it's like, I, I take the 85 year old looking back perspective of what would I be most content with? There's my three minute answer.

• 39:28Speaker 06

  Good. No, it's good. And I think I, one more question, because I know we're up. What, one more, really, really great. What would you, what would you, what would you tell, so when we started, we had two kids under 18 months. And it was an absolute shit show and we were broke. And I wouldn't trade it for anything because so many lessons came out of that. But what would you tell the entrepreneur who didn't optimize for money first? And they were just getting off the ground. Like if I had you 15 years ago, what, what would you tell me?

• 40:00Alex Hormozi?

  To the person who did kids first and then started later, I think it's just accepting what you have that somebody who started earlier doesn't. Like I talked to an entrepreneur who's the exact same age as me, and I think right now his, his oldest kid is like 14, or so youngest kid is 14 or something like that. And so like, almost all the kids are out of the house. And he's like, well, you know, when I'm 42 or 43, we're going to be completely emptinessers. And we're doing the second half of kind of living our, our married life of, and it's just like, I don't think there's a right way to do it. I think that like, there's a way that I did it. There's a way that you did it. There's a way that plenty of people do it. I'm just, again, I'm just very against the judgment of, like, I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I think the judgment on the comparison is. So saying that some person does better than me, that's a comparison. Saying that, and because of that, I'm a piece of shit.

• 40:44Alex Hormozi?

  That's the, that's the part that hurts. And so I think as long as you say, yeah, it makes sense that that person, they made a trade that I haven't made. And I got something that they don't have. We made different trades. And also let's say, let's take a different extreme, which is somebody did absolutely nothing and just watched Netflix for the, a decade and, and partied. Well, they lived it up in their twenties and they're probably not going to be able to live it up in their, in their forties or fifties. And some like people might say, I'd rather live it up in my twenties when I have the energy and all that stuff. And I'd rather trade the back half of the years because I'm not going to have the energy to do it. Fine. That's a trade that you make. And I, I just, I, I say like, if you like the path that I had, this is how I did it. You can do whatever you want. Take the pieces that work for you. But I definitely am not in the, like, you must, I don't must anything.

• 41:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:26Alex Hormozi?

  Do whatever you want. Yeah. That's my.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  Fair. Me too.

• 41:29Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 06

  That's all I got.

• 41:31Alex Hormozi?

  Cool. Okay. So moment of, moment of truth.

• 41:36Alex Hormozi?

  Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it. Yeah. Moment of truth. $10,000 winner. I mean, it goes to two different people. I'm going to split it and I'm going to explain why. I think from a purely logic perspective, I said never for work-life balance. And there was an example of somebody who had a work-life balance and built a big business. So I will give you that. And this is my, this is my gift. There you go. And the, the second one goes to one that I think actually has a lot of utility for me. Which is, it was just a great reminder around the vast majority of my audience actually already is trying to be exceptional. And doesn't need as much of the, call it hyper-aggression, if you will. But yeah, no, I thought that was a really good reminder.

• 42:17Alex Hormozi?

  You bet. You bet. Thank you. This is our first ever one of these, whatever you want to call it. If you like it, put a comment that you liked it. And if you hated it, you can do that too. But yeah, anyways, we'll see you maybe in the next one. All right. Rock and roll.